Samsung's fourth quarter preliminary sales show the mobile unit may be improving, but the company will need to provide applications with real Internet of things intelligence if it wants to smooth out the feast or famine hardware business.

From productivity to email to operating systems to mobile to hardware, David Gewirtz is no longer actively using Microsoft products. He's not a Microsoft hater. The transition just happened organically as he adopted products that better served his needs.

The rapid growth of cloud services like AWS will have a big impact on hardware, in particular on servers and other gear in data centers, but also on how we use PCs and mobile devices. Here are my takeaways from re:Invent.